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NTSB issues safety recommendations for signal maintenance work
Comments, please, Brotherhood of Railway Signalmen, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Transport Workers Union Locasl #100, et al.
I don’t know what best practices are given in the safety advisory and codes mentioned, but any signal maintenance procedure that allows a crossing warning system to be disable on active rails or allows a false favorable signal to be displayed despite a misaligned switch is very seriously flawed and needs review.
It appears that in both cases the signal maintainers were not in communication with dispatchers so they did not know or were advised that a train was coming into their block. The Dispatchers should have known where the maintainers were and advised the train operators of signal work in the area while advising the maintainers that a train was approaching. In other words several people “assumed the assumption” and as usual “stuff happens”.